Detailed plot synopsis reviews of The Ballad of Cable Hogue

Cable Hogue has just been robbed and abandoned, without water, in the Nevada desert by his partners Taggart and Bowen. Four days later, on the verge of dying of thirst, Hogue discovers a spring right next to a stagecoach track. As the spring is located more than 20 miles away from the nearest town, Cable Hogue decides to buy these two acres of land and to start to sell water to the stagecoach passengers. Hogue's secret hope is that Taggart and Bowen will stop by him one day and that he could then take revenge on them.

Cable Hogue will be helped in his business by the local banker, by Joshua Douglas Sloan, a preacher more interested in women than in sermons, and above all by Hildy, a prostitute who comes to live with him when she's expelled from the town. Cable and Hildy are happy for a while but Hildy decides then to go to San Francisco to make a fortune while Hogue is still waiting for his revenge. A few months later, Taggart and Bowen finally reappear and Cable Hogue is more than ready to take revenge on them.